ruinate
by my cure on ice
Summary: when nakuru leafed endlessly through the shelves of leather-bound books in kaho’s privatized sect of the library, she couldn’t bring herself to be unsurprised at how many of them were hollow from cover to cover. [nakurukaho] [eriolkaho]
1. the breach of custom

_ruinate_  
by Bethany Ten  
**chapter 1**: the breach of custom

Nakuru found it in the hazy throes of abandon when she extended the radius of her subconscious, opened her mind only slightly to a familiar grace and beauty, plainness and simplicity and anything but, and invincibility not to be had or held by mortal man. "It" was a sense of encroaching danger, like an omen, like a dark cloud overshadowing the sunrise, the intangible sense that the world as she knew it would fall to dust in her hands; she hated that sort of feeling. She hated circumstances that were beyond her control.

And nothing was beyond her control.

Every now and then, as of late, a shadow crossed Kaho's face, a thought that marred that impossibly immaculate face and bowed her head as though she was in awe of something greater looming over the horizon. And when the woman carved letters deep-set and twisted in the pages of her journal, she would end each entry with a signature like a flourish, and then she would throw the pages into the fireplace because they were for someone named "your eyes only".

When Nakuru leafed endlessly through the shelves of leather-bound books in Kaho's privatized sect of the library, she couldn't bring herself to be unsurprised at how many of them were hollow from cover to cover; she couldn't bring herself to smile at the ones with still-blank pages, and when she imagined them burning her lips curved downward like a leaflet crinkling in flame.

"Nakuru?"

There was candlelight swallowing the dark midnight hues in the library, and Nakuru dropped the fleshless book-spine she'd been clutching, thinking _Ishouldn't'vebeencaughtIshouldn't've…_

She could feel the tilt of Kaho's head—curious to the point of condescension. "It's a bit early to be wandering around out here, isn't it?"

She spun. "Yeah, it is, isn't it? I was just going—to—get a glass of water." Her eyes grazed the shelves, and she laughed shrilly (she was good at that). "Now, how did I end up here…? Ohoho…"

Kaho said nothing in reply, instead choosing to smile demurely and stand stock-still, and though it had to be at least two hours before sunrise there was not a trace of visible sleep in her eyes; her nightgown nipped at her heels, laced at her collarbone and gathering the dust that still blanketed the trodden floors. Nakuru's acute hearing detected the rustle of windswept velvet, though there was no breeze.

"Well, I suppose I'll just be on my merry way," Nakuru hummed. "Good night!"

Her eyes arced into an amiable grin. She inclined her head in a bow and a dismissal, curling her fingers around the doorknob. (Kaho's section of the library was fenced in, to a relative extent, like the way birds were contained at pet shops—in closed, stuffy areas with monitored temperatures; half the wall was actual wall, whilst the rest was netting, wire-coiled diamond fences painted a dusty black. And though the "actual wall" extended just past Nakuru's waist, indentations were carved in even them with painstaking perfection to allow room for more books that, perhaps, were not empty journals.)

"By the way…"

Much to her own dismay, a sudden shiver weaned Nakuru's right hand from the doorknob. She cradled it in her left. "Yeees?"

"Before you leave, you wouldn't mind putting back that book you dropped, would you?"

There it was. That saccharine aloofness that was so Eriol and yet entirely Kaho, the exotic Japanese lilt in those English syllables where Nakuru's accents were perfected to a fault.

Nakuru turned slowly, dragging her feet, her smile stiffening further. "Of course!"

Kaho was smiling absently with her eyes shut as Nakuru knelt to gather the fallen journal. "I get lost here all the time, it seems. Now, where did you say you were going? If you're looking for company—"

"Actually," Nakuru cut in, the corner of her lip twitching, "forget the water. I'm gonna sleep, okay?"

And with her back pressed to the door, enough so that she thought the twist-runes on the frame would brand themselves on her skin, she twisted the knob and slipped out of there, away from the candlelit corridors, but not quickly enough—Kaho's bemused "I thought so" was a vague, pristine pinch at the back of her mind, like a glass chime, and Nakuru didn't know if she slept or not that night, only that by daybreak her head hurt so much she thought it would burst, and she was afraid except not for herself.


	2. powder

_ruinate_  
by Bethany Ten  
**chapter 2**: powder

The bitterest poisons were easiest to swallow.

Nakuru ate a needless breakfast in needless silence, her knuckles a glassy white and curled around the spoon in her hand. Her usual atmosphere of bubbles and butterflies seemed to have melted away with the vernal colors that littered the London vineyards. When Kaho stood to collect the dishes, humming a tremulous song that towered above the wordy banter Eriol and Suppi exchanged over the morning paper, Nakuru bolted, stumbling into the courtyard.

If there was anything the twin moon guardians shared, it was a deep, unprecedented loathing for summer. English summers were mild things, all cool breezes and sunshine, where Tomoeda summers were dreary, blaring suns and stiff atmospheres; the grass crunched noisily beneath her usually light step, and her acute hearing thrummed with the activity of the little things.

She thought of the library, of Kaho under candlelight, and shuddered in spite of herself as she upturned her face to the light. What had lured her to that part of the library, anyway?

It hadn't been meager curiosity; that much was for certain. She'd been curious originally, of course, but eventually, that passed when it became apparent that access to that area was taboo. Nakuru was nosy, yes, but not enough so to give her the will or the way to defy her master's mistress. An intangible sense of magic always drifted through the atmosphere whenever you headed too far north in the library, like the sweetest scent, the alluring fragrance of sandalwood and cinnamon and sugarcane. She realized, then, that the sugary smells served as a prudent gate to ward away Suppi, who determinedly asserted his dominance over sweet things.

The magic was stronger, all of a sudden, in the temperate ditches of August. It wasn't like Touya, whose vanished powers were magnetism of a special sort, but it certainly attracted her interest—so much so that she'd intruded upon Kaho's caged world of vacant books and jam-packed bookshelves, of fireplaces that flickered for forever, the northernmost sect of the library; she shuddered again. The library was shaped like a pentacle.

"Nakuru…?"

She jumped.

"Are you alright?"

And there was Kaho. Long hair suspended in a messy bun that left tresses of auburn curling at her waist, a satin bathrobe fastened around her prone form, pajama pants dotted with crude imitations of fish, fuzzy slippers—she looked harmless. And she _was_ harmless—a fact that had long solidified itself in Nakuru's mindset, a fact that she was—maybe—beginning to doubt.

She'd shed her little quarter-cloak, though. Maybe she only wore it in the house. Nakuru couldn't remember, for some reason.

"Of course I'm alright!" she exclaimed, injecting mild surprise into her tone. She smiled her dazzling smile. "Why wouldn't I be? It's _gorgeous_ outside, and I just _had_ to see it for myself."

Kaho smiled back, her airy little smile, and suddenly the muscles behind her own grin fell limp as though scalded; Nakuru's face felt waxen, and she felt dampened and blanketed simultaneously, smothered and safe. "Would you like to come back inside soon? Eriol hadn't noticed you left the dining hall…" She was so _warm_; her speech was unfaltering, even as it trailed off. "It _is_ gorgeous out, isn't it?"

The simple warmth in her half-sung statement suddenly made it impossible for Nakuru's painted lips not to upturn; she looked up, and yielded her vision to the unending blue. "I wanna go to Hyde Park today!" she chirped abruptly. "Can we go? We can go, right? Kaho? _Please_?"

Kaho pursed her lips; they curved at one end, angular, almost imperceptible (she knew Nakuru could see that). "_Well_…"

"Kaho!"

Kaho's smile reappeared, blossoming like the roses that wouldn't grow in the summertime (red, red, white, white—the colors rippling through Kaho's priestess robes, artfully maintained and immaculate just like Kaho herself). "If you can get yourself cleaned up and dressed in an hour or so, I'm sure Eriol will take us there."

"Really?" Nakuru squeaked, hands curling at her chest. "Okay! I'm gonna get ready right now! Thanks, Kaho! You're the best!" And she contemplated throwing her arms around the woman, like she did often and spontaneously with many of her acquaintances at Tomoeda; she did. Flinging her lanky limbs around Kaho for a brief second—she _knew_. For that brief second, for the first third of that second, she felt nothing but the perfect satin of Kaho's bathrobe; for the last two thirds, her index finger danced along the perfect satin of the skin at the nape of Kaho's neck—everything went Christmas-angel-cloud nine-winter-white, then exploded.

And I don't know what could've shocked her that badly, for those vibrant eyes of hers to blank out altogether if only for an instant, a stitched, blank fresco of amber, but for a brief instant, it was _her_ hands throwing paper into a fire, _her_ hands tracing the stroke order for _hitsuzen_ in her open palm like it was something she did every day, as reflexive as tapping one's foot; she was omniscient, she knew everything, and there was _noise_: the rising din, a clamor of voices she would never know. _There's a crying girl in Kanagawa; she's six years old almost to the day, and has black hair and brown eyes. Her mother puts sleeping pills in her milk, no prescription—he doesn't know he's hurting him. When he kills himself, he will use a gun and he will be standing on the fire escape, and the last thing he'll see is blue for the NYPD police car sirens, and his boyfriend's bloodshot eyes_—languidly detaching itself from the memories and the pasts and the presents and the futures—there was _singing_; someone was _singing_…

Kaho relinquished the embrace, because it was suddenly am embrace, her gentle arms cradling Nakuru's stock-still frame. Obviously, that second had been long enough. She deemed it so.

Nakuru took a graceful step backwards, a step that was barely a stumble—she caught herself in time. The silence was unnerving, the atmosphere between her memories and her closed mouth too thick and ashen for words.

Kaho smiled.

She said, "I'll tell Eriol where we intend on going, okay? Run along, now. If we hurry, we could get to the park by noon and…have a picnic, maybe?"

Nakuru opened her mouth to respond, and then coughed, daintily raising her hand to cover her mouth; her palm was spattered with phlegm, and she retracted it with disgust, tilting her palm. Her throat was dry, and the once-pleasant sun was a migraine waiting to happen. Her headache was not unlike the one she'd experienced upon awakening shortly after sunrise; her mind felt as though it was going to bleed through the back of her head. Her hand, caressed by slime, turned into a fist; she nodded, and fled again, assailed by déjà vu when Kaho's voice called after her again, quietly: "I thought you hated the summertime…"

● ● ●

Her smile melted like the wax on a lit candle, oozing pretty crimson like the paint on her lips; she busied herself with rummaging through the cabinets, as the sun assailed her through the fragmented bathroom windows, highlighting her featureless shape, her tiny waist. Her nightshirt, sleeveless thing the obnoxious shade of watermelon, exposed a slice of skin drawn over sculpted and slender muscle; she was simple elegance, and not unlike Kaho in that aspect. She was almost…plain.

The bathroom was large; the shower was a stall plastered to one of the corners, and the bathtub was a vast porcelain thing in the center, with dials and knobs and faucets dipped in gold. She opted for the haste offered by the shower, and slipped inside, only able to focus on the monotony of the walls and the confined space. Trails of caramel trickled through the ivory like veins. When she turned on the shower, she was reminded of rain, or pale waterfalls.

And as she combed her fingers through her hair, shampoo running in bubbly rivulets in the strands, she closed her eyes, trying to steal back a bit of the noise; it was _terrible_ noise, there was no refuting that. It was terrible. It was knowledge and foresight and hindsight, 20/20 vision, temples erected in gold and Shinto shrines falling to dust in the gibbous moon, a tidal wave swallowing those effigies of worship and god-love whole. Water. _Mizu_._ Mizuki_.

She thought of a little girl in Kanagawa with black hair and brown eyes, whose mother would purposefully put too many pills in her milk. She thought of a teenage boy in New York who'd abused his lover and would kill himself, with a gun, on a fire escape, the last thing to cross his eyes to be blue. Then she thought of singing, the musical warble she'd tried to hard to discern above the _noise_…and though she was sure she'd been intimately acquainted billions upon billions upon billions of things, _everything_, she could only remember those things because they'd been narrated to her, and how Kaho's skin was softer than the robes draped loosely on her shoulders, whiter than her _hakui_…

She thought of Touya, of his cold omniscience, his purposeful distance, his silences and his actions that both screamed where his words could not. His magic was an indolent puddle, untamed and bendable like his shadow. She thought of Yue, who _loved_ him where he was fated to love Sakura. She wondered if Kaho had seen that, too.

She thought of defying destiny, and belatedly realized that with the soaked washcloth in her left hand, she'd worked her palms raw and red, skin in broken fragments that curled somewhere near her wrists; there was a flurry of blood in tiny pinpricks, until the water bade them away.

When she exited the shower, a pile of clothes was folded and set atop the basin. When she pulled the shirt on, she knew Kaho had picked them out for her, because the sleeves drooped past her wrists, still slim and slender but swallowing the rough damage on her hands.

● ● ●

Nakuru was wearing lavender: pastel shirt with silken violet ribbons woven in and out of the collar, tied in a sagging flourish at the base of her sternum. Her hair was parted into two large ponytails at the back of her skull, one directly above the other. She was pleated denim skirts, beads and ribbons in complex patterns in her hair; she _was_ the summer, and her shark's grin was back in its rightful place when her the liquid-fire pain in her hand subsided to a dull ache.

She wasn't _so_ transparent here. Though Eriol supposedly did know everything about her, he didn't know _everything_ about her; Yue had been Clow's blank canvas, his thoughts so easily read by the variegating shades of flashes of chrome in the sullen moon guardian's eyes. Nakuru hid things in plain sight (it's always in the last place you look, after all). She was manipulative enough, calculative enough—

—but not like Kaho.

When Nakuru descended the main staircase into the entrance hall, Kaho was dressed. Her sunglasses, perched atop her head, artfully deflected the chandelier lights, the reflection of the lights casting white medallions on the massive family portrait suspended from the wall adjacent to where the two stairwells converged into the main one; her sweater was ivory, and her jeans were blue and plain, a bland black belt a useless, buckled loop above the waistline of her pants. Black stockings were her choice replacement for socks; her sneakers portrayed not so much as a scuff.

"Isn't it a little hot for a sweater?" Nakuru asked, by way of genuine curiosity.

Kaho beamed. "_I_ don't think so." Then, at length, she said, "You don't suppose it could've gotten warmer since this morning, do you? Should I take it off?"

"Of course not! You look great!"

Her laughter was glass bells and promises. And she opened her mouth to speak, and a syllable slipped out, but then she closed it, because another voice announced itself; Nakuru was almost startled, before she gently reminded herself, that, no, she and Kaho were not the sole residents of the manor—a fact that, perhaps, escaped her, if only for twelve hours or so.

At the least, Eriol looked fifteen or sixteen nowadays, his height rapidly gaining vantage over sporadic spans of time, bearing a terrific semblance to some portraits of Clow; his aging appearance forced him to switch schools at a rapid-fire pace so as not to draw attention. With one hand, he was fumbling with the top button of his collared shirt—fumbling so uncharacteristically, she was tempted to believe that he was trying to prove something to himself, nurturing his humanity rather than his perfections; Kaho smiled, and whatever words she'd said to him were lost to Nakuru's ears as she tilted down only slightly to assist with the button. She was talking to him then, her voice muted somehow, her smile lingering like a tease of a phantom; Eriol's reply was a patient smile, and when her fingers lingered on his collar for a touch unnecessary, their lips met.

It was chaste, sweet and simple; for a second, the longest of seconds since that morning, there was a flash of crimson in her eyes like a drifting cloud. She saw magic, literal and figurative, lightning tearing apart the air around them; there was no space between them, except for the graceful curve of Kaho's neck where she tilted her head. Theirs was a secret world, something to be seen and not understood, as half-walled as Kaho's library, almost too amazing not to watch and too secluded to intrude upon.

And, yes, Kaho looked significantly older, but Eriol's eyes had seen more years than his physical body; his tongue knew the inside of her mouth like it was the only story he'd bothered—wanted—to finish telling. And they had forever, or something very close to forever, to continue telling that story, with slow, exact touches and sunset-warm eyes. Kaho was beautiful—always beautiful—but she was more so when she was in love.

It was over soon; the feelings of guilty intrusion that'd bloomed inside Nakuru had subsided, and in its place something dark hovered there. It had enough time to extend its reaches to the tips of her elongated fingers, curling them into slight fists; she expelled the feeling with her next breath. Her hands fell limp at her sides.

Their foreheads were still touching, and their voices were audible, yawning into existence.

"Suppi is adding the final touches to the basket; he wasn't eating anything when you last saw him, was he?"

"No. He was in the wine cellar…"

"Oh? I do hope he remembered the ones I picked out. …_I_ don't remember the ones I picked out…"

Eriol's laughter was serene and content; he wove his fingers into her hair, adjusted her sunglasses, and then said, "I'll get the car ready." He pulled away, gently, his fingertips never snagging on a single strand. He watched tresses cascade over her clavicle—his doing—and his nostrils contracted, stealing a piece of her sweet aroma for himself, because he would be missing it between the time in which he'd go to the garage, and the time in which he would see her next: in the passenger seat of his car, clutching his free hand and playing listlessly with his fingers.


End file.
